Background to the Bliain le Baisteach project - Mikael Fernstrom

When Sean Taylor approached me early in 1999, asking if it was possible to create music from rainfall data, a number of years of research suddenly crystallised into a “yes”. In my research on Sonic Browsing I had investigated if it was possible to browse sounds and music through hearing, creating computer programs that would allow people to navigate through screenscape and soundscape simultaneously. In a paper in 1997 I had described what it felt like using my Sonic Browser, “like walking through a Fleadh Ceoil gone mad”, with many different songs playing at the same time. The Sonic Browser enabled people to find a song almost thirty percent faster than with ordinary visual methods. I had also tried, at one stage, to make sounds and music from environmental pollution data, but at that time this was not my main objective. When Sean asked me if I wanted to develop this project together, I felt it was also a unique opportunity to “practice what I preach”, as a lecturer in Music Technology and Interactive Media at the University of Limerick. I also realised that I have spent far too many years expressing my ideas as a scientist, suppressing the artist and composer within.

In Bliain Le Baisteach you can experience many different things. First of all, the rainfall data itself is very complex and chaotic by nature. There is no way we can escape the weather, and we really don’t have any means or methods control it. Looking at the data just as numbers makes very little sense - endless lists of numbers. One can, of course, create a graph from the data, which gives you a visual diagram with hills and valleys, making more meaning than just the numbers. You can then, for example, see at what time of the year things are really wet. Perhaps in the future, by making music from rain data, we might be able to forecast the weather through musical expectation?

You can also look and listen to Bliain Le Baisteach on a micro - macro level. The sweeping patterns of swirly weather systems coming in from the Atlantic in the satellite images are like looking at an oil painting at a distance. On the micro level, the rainfall data is like moving closer, looking at the individual brush strokes, although you are not looking at this level - you listen. If we had just made straight sounds or notes of the data, it wouldn’t have sounded very interesting. By devising a neural network trained with traditional Irish music, you get the brush strokes reanimated with musical Gestalts - patterns or gestures that carries meaning on a higher level; musical structures that our minds can get a grip on and understand.
It is also interesting to think about that we have squeezed a full year of information into some few minutes of music. It is all there, all the rain of Ireland, down to the very last note.

Bliain Le Baisteach is a multimedia work. We are using both images and music, trying to show what is going on in our environment through both sound and images. Most of my ideas about how the visual relates to the auditory, and the way I can work with the senses as a composer and scientist, are influenced by for example Douglas Hofstadter’s book from 1979, “Gödel, Esher Bach”, where he develops and explains an understanding of aesthetics that bridges the gaps between visual art (Esher), music (Bach) and mathematics (Gödel). He shows how certain patterns in each discipline can resonate with the human mind and how the different disciplines can express the same idea, sometimes from different viewpoints. Blain Le Baisteach, being a multimedia work, attempts to apply these ideas in a contemporary way.

In this work, I also hope we have shown that art and science can be one. Perhaps the closure of the 20th century is the end of the Cartesian worldview and that we from now on can start to work with a bigger picture.

Finally, working with the Irish Chamber Orchestra has been a real pleasure. They are the most talented, virtuoso musicians I’ve ever worked with. It is amazing how they have added human dimensions to a piece of music grown from chaotic data and mathematical ideas.

Next time you see, hear and feel the rain, think about that it is probably one of the main factors enabling life on this planet…

Mikael Fernström, Lisnagry, County Limerick, 13th of May 2000